Andraste

The Broccoli Test

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 22:27:57 GMT

So I was talking to people about the Broccoli Test, i.e. the fandom meme where you try and work out if your OTP can successfully signal 'buy broccoli' to one another from opposite ends of the produce section. Most of my pairings either fail spectacularly or cheat wildly, but thinking it over I realised that I have one that could actually do this!

( Read on to find out which two actually manage to communicate ... )

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In Which We Are All Hugo Winners

Tue, 20 Aug 2019 10:25:21 GMT

So, as everyone doubtless knows by now, AO3 won a Hugo award! On the one hand, I'm not sure Best Related Work was really designed for this, but on the other, it's nice to see the infrastructure and community acknowledged. I am curious to see what approach the committee will take in future if it gets nominated again, though, since there doesn't seem to be anything about its development in 2018 in particular that would qualify it.

I think my favourite part is the number of people who think all the fanfic writers posting 'LOL, I am now a Hugo winner!!!' actually believe this. I guess if you haven't spent any time in fanfic-dominated fandom circles it might be difficult to parse our sense of humour?

That said, the things I am most proud of winning one one-millionenth of a Hugo for:

1. Somehow accumulating more than five hundred kudos on this ridiculous story. I guess that's what happens when you post something at the height of a fandom's movie-related resurgence!

2. Having the most-kudosed Trigun story on the entire archive that isn't a crossover with five other things. (I used to wonder how on Earth this had happened, given that it was never a popular story back when I wrote it. Then I realised how little of the Trigun fanfic on the internet had actually made it onto AO3 and it made more sense. I guess if you go looking for Vash/Wolfwood, that is one of the best things you will actually be able to find fifteen years after the fandom's heyday.)

3. Being the only person on the archive to use the tag 'Robot Watersports'. (It's not quite the only Transformers watersports story on there, but it is the only one with that precise description. There seems to be a lot of watersports fanfic in Mr. Robot, which is not really the same thing.)

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The Robots Have Come For Our Television

Sat, 26 Jan 2019 11:48:21 GMT

I am currently most of the way through the third of Martha Wells' Murderbot novellas, and enjoying it as much as the first two. Like a lot of fans, I find Murderbot's wish to sit quietly in a cupboard watching its favourite show extremely relatable, which I suspect is one of the reasons the series is so popular. (I mean, the other reasons include it being well-written, exciting and funny but I bet murderbot being a fellow fan helps.)

This got me wondering if this is a trend in AI in modern science fiction. Between Murderbot and the sentient ship Justice of Toren collecting songs in Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series and the drama-loving maintanence bots of Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire there are quite a few examples out there. Maybe we're moving away from robots that want to kill us or robots that want to be us toward robots that would rather be left alone but appreciate humans because some of the stuff we make is pretty neat. Maybe intelligent computers just want to look at pictures of our cats or maybe even write some fanfic.. And while Murderbot is not more plausible than HAL or Data, I have to admit I would love if it turned out that our future combat bots wanted to watch TV or collect songs.

That said, I feel like the example of David from Prometheus proves that you can have too much of a good thing. Probably if we ever invent AI we should program it NOT to watch Lawrence of Arabia THAT many times. (I mean, I personally believe it is the greatest film ever made and therefore a good example of human endeavour, but clearly something goes badly wrong in an AI brain after years of such intense exposure. If only Murderbot had been passing by and given him their copies of Sanctuary Moon for variety.)

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Yuletide Is Upon Us

Sun, 23 Sep 2018 06:19:29 GMT

It feels like Yuletide gets earlier every year, even though I know this is an illusion and it's actually starting a bit later this year than last. I mean, I should know its due as soon as my dad starts panicking about Christmas, but somehow it is always a surprise.*

I've put in my nominations - this year I chose Archive 81, Moon Knight and Unavowed so I hope there's someone out there looking forward to writing about weird podcasts, weird superheroes and weird RPGs where your character doesn't hit or shoot anyone. I don't know what I'm going to choose for my other request(s), but I should be able to fall back on The Magnus Archives if necessary. I've also been watching The Dragon Prince this week, which I assume will also be nominated and eligible. (Viren is my favourite. I know this is going to end badly.) None of my nominations are approved yet, and I am resisting the temptation to check on them every hour, which I know only slows the archive down.

I also need to get a New Year's Resolution story done, since I dropped out after the deadline a couple of years back. (I just could not get my story to work at all. One of the few things I have ever outright deleted instead of putting it in the 'maybe later' folder where all of my many failed stories live.) At the moment I have a complete draft and I hate it so I'm going to leave it for a week or so for that to simmer down - things rarely seem as terrible if I'm able to sit on them for a while. I should really check if the NYR collection is going to close any time soon ...

*Yes, my father always starts fretting about where Christmas will be and who will be there and how we will get home afterwards in the middle of September. I blame all the years when we were trying to see both sides of the family on Christmas Day even though they lived three hours apart. He has not yet adjusted to the fact that now all my grandparents are gone this will never be an issue again. (My sister-in-law's family are Chinese and don't do Christmas so it's not a problem for my brother.)

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Vale, Sabine

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 02:55:36 GMT

I have just heard that iamsab.livejournal.com passed away yesterday. She was a wonderful writer and a smart, funny fan who will be dearly missed by a lot of people, including me.

I loved her stories - especially her Farscape stuff, which I read before I ever interacted with her and which turned my brain inside out in the best possible way. But the best and most important thing she ever did for me was say 'hey, we should run a ficathon!'

Back in 2004 - and I can't believe that it's been nine years - we were on AIM one afternoon, talking about how we should totally get selenak to write a Londo/Chiana story. And it was Sab who came up with the delightfully crazy plan of creating a whole space show crossover ficathon to achieve this. Thus was Multiverse born.

(If you're thinking 'but wait, Selena didn't write that Londo/Chiana story until years later' then you would be right. It turns out that asking Selena to write the story worked better. Nevertheless, I regret nothing.)

In twelve years of active fanning I have written some pretty good stories and vidded some pretty good vids, but there's nothing I'm as proud of as Multiverse. I flew solo on modding duties in subsequent years, but the whole thing would never have happened without Sab. I wish she wasn't gone.

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Kudos For Kudos

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 11:05:41 GMT

Hanging around the internet as I do, I've seen grumbling in various places about the AO3's Kudos button. This is mainly because some people feel that it discourages readers from leaving actual comments. I just felt moved to say that that this is not true for my work - I get more kudos than I ever got comments on things, and the kudos keeps turning up. It's always been rare for me to get comments or e-mail about a story or vid I posted years ago, but kudos never seems to stop coming. Both from people I know have been reading my work for a long time (you know who you are - and thanks!) and from people who, as far as I can tell, have never communicated with me before in any way. (Also from people who either don't have accounts or don't post logged in, so I cannot tell who they might be. Thank you, mysterious internet strangers.) People who have something to say other than 'I liked this!' still seem to comment, as well.

This came to mind today because, as some of you already know, I've been having kind of a rough time lately. It's just really nice that every afternoon I get an e-mail amounting to 'hey, people like that thing you made!' Even though I've barely posted fic in ages, it reminds me that there are still readers out there.

Reading on the AO3 has also got me sending way more feedback than I have in years. I used to be pretty good back in the mailing list days (when dinosaurs roamed the earth ...) but became terrible after everything moved to livejournal. Now I can bookmark things and go back later, and if I can't think of anything to say I can just hit the kudos button to express my general positive feelings.

So, y'know, I am grateful for the attention and encourage you to continue pressing the button if you feel moved to do so *g*.

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Happy New Year!

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:12:08 GMT

Happy 2012, everyone!

2011 had good parts and bad parts for me. On the one hand, I became gainfully employed! On the other, I had to drop out of Yuletide due to my grandmother passing away twelve days before Christmas. (No, not the one we expected to die earlier in 2011. The other one. She was eighty-five and had cancer in multiple organs, so this was sad but far from the worst thing that could have happened.)

My only resolutions for the coming year are to write more and vid more, because boy, I did not do enough of that in 2011. (Well, that and 'put vids up on the AO3', but that's sort of supplemental to making more of them.) I wrote one story that more than two thousand people read and made one vid that seven people watched. (Possibly dozens of people downloaded the vid and didn't like enough to send feedback, but I know which explanation I prefer ...) I will leave it to the reader to work out which of these things I put more effort into. This is not a complaint or a request for feedback, incidentally, it just amuses me to observe the vagaries of fandom popularity *g*.

It was, nevertheless, a good year for fandom as far as I was concerned. Fox and Matthew Vaughan made me the GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME. Or at least it felt that way to me, despite its flaws. As a result, the pairing that have been my OTP since I was fourteen became wildly popular! This resulted in piles and piles of awesome fanwork about them and made me very happy. I wrote a deeply silly story about them which was also wildly popular, and that was fun too.

My other fandoms did pretty well. I played Dragon Age 2 five times, and although hanging out on the BioWare forums frequently exasperated me the game itself brought me great joy. Fringe kept being awesome. I liked the new characters on House, appreciated the resolution to the season cliffhanger, and made high-pitched squealing noises over Foreman's Season Eight storyline. Castle continued to be frothy entertainment with occasional serious bits. G.I. Joe: Renegades was the best animated version of that canon ever. My friends made me realise that friendship truly is magic, especially if brightly-coloured ponies were involved.

In addition, Merlin somehow turned into good television while I wasn't looking. I mean, I've always enjoyed it, but I started watching for the fun of pointing and laughing at the stained glass windows, running water and potatoes. In Season Four it has actually been well-written, well acted and compelling. (Qualities it had flashes of before, to be certain, but never so consistently.) I was surprised but pleased.

Doctor Who continued to make me happy in 2011. I don't think I enjoyed Season Six quite as much as Season Five, but The Doctor's Wife is my favourite Eleven episode so far, and I also adored The God Complex and the season finale, so it's not like I'm complaining. I continued to explore the universe of audios, comics and prose as well, and found some new-to-me gems. (My favourite audio was Farewell, Great Macedon and my favourite novel was Cold Fusion.)

I cheerfully ignored the DC reboot and did not buy any X-Men comics, even though I wanted to know what the whole Schism business was about and what Charles was up to. I was probably happier this way.

Somewhere in there I read a pile of books - favourites included Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell. My non-fiction favourites were Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine and The Ancestor Cell and The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins.

I bought too many toys. I was not sorry.

And in a nice end to the year, yesterday I got to see The Adventures of Tintin and LOVED it. This would be my favourite film of the year, only a different comic book adaptation had the unfair advantage of containing Charles Xavier drinking a yard of ale. I will make another post about how happy I am that my first comic book love now has a worthy film version.

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Manga Recs?

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:32:15 GMT

Since I am just about finished reading Mushishi and Saiyuki is sadly on indefinite hiatus, I find myself with a bit of a gap in my reading. Sure, I have plenty of Western comics I haven't read yet, but manga hits a different set of buttons. I thought the internet was bound to have ideas for what I should read next.

Things I already have access to: Trigun, Yami no Matsui, Fruits Basket, Cantarella, Nightmare Inspector, Death Note, Nausicaa, Pet Shop of Horrors, Wild Adapter and Eagle.

I am open to pretty much anything, although pure romance is not my genre in any medium. The characters have to be hunting serial killers or saving the world or committing daring robberies between significant glances.

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An Endless Avalanche of TV

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 03:38:52 GMT

Just when I think I safely caught up on all my currently airing TV shows, or will be as soon as Merlin finishes ... magically appearing on my hard drive by the power of magic ... I recall that Batman: The Brave and the Bold is screening new episodes. There are now half a dozen that I haven't seen. Catching up on the Birds of Prey plus Blue Beetle and Booster Gold is going to be no chore, naturally, but it it does once again remind me that I am never going to watch all the shows.

I am not even keeping up with that many! At the moment I am just watching Castle, House, Fringe and Merlin along with some things that air on Australian TV. I am planning to take a look at Undercovers as soon as someone inserts extra hours into the day.

You would think that an unemployed student would have more time for television, but between schoolwork, writing, vidding, reading, communicating with the internet and the occasional spot of eating, sleeping and doing housework I only watch around an hour and a half a day. Perhaps I need to rejigger my schedule if I am to have any hope of ever catching up on my 'TV shows I really should watch' list. (There are one hundred and one things on it at the moment. One hundred and one! This is ridiculous.)

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Sometimes Fandom Surprises Me ...

Thu, 13 May 2010 09:50:03 GMT

I just added the first instance of the tag sex in a cave to the AO3. I have a hard time believing there aren't other instances of this in the archive, so maybe it's being tagged as something else? There's one for 'cave-in' but the cave in my story is perfectly intact - the characters are just in there to hide from the dinosaurs outside. And have sex.

I wasn't surprised that another story of mine is the only thing tagged 'robot waterspots' (... don't ask) but I am disappointed that fandom is making it difficult for me to find characters in caves!

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Thank You, Mysterious Benefactor!

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:29:57 GMT

Someone bought me two months extra paid Dreamwidth time today! Thank you, oh anonymous person, it is much appreciated.

(Not cross-posted since there doesn't seem to be much point sending this over to livejournal ...

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raises glass to another decade

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:30:14 GMT

Thirty years ago today, my parents were finally getting some sleep after my inconveniently-timed birth and a day of getting used to having their first baby. Presumably I was also sleeping - I arrived at three-thirty in the morning which I imagine must have been tiring for me as well as my poor mother.

In addition, it was ten years ago today that I posted my first fanfic. It is far from the best thing I've ever written, but I'd be disappointed if I hadn't improved somewhat in a decade of practice. Not only am I incredulous that I have been active in fandom that long, I find it hard to believe that it's ten years since Marvel temporarily killed Cyclops.

Since then, I have met many fans both online and in RL, some of whom I travelled half way around the globe to meet. I have taken up vidding. I have run a ficathon that has caused an insane number of great crossovers to be written. I have watched a hell of a lot of TV. I have somehow been crowned queen of tentacle porn in a fandom I'm pretty sure I had never heard of when I started all this. What a long, strange trip it's been.

The way I see it, since I am hoping to live until I'm ninety, I have another sixty years of fandom to look forward to! I wonder what new fannish activities we will have come up with by then?

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Sunday TV Meme

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 08:25:31 GMT

Pick five of your favourite shows, in no particular order, before you read the questions below, then answer them!

1. Babylon 5
2. House
3. Doctor Who
4. Justice League (Unlimited)
5. due South

( Read on ... )

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